Category Archives: Exploding Stars

One of the hilarious things about Russia (there are so very many to choose from, but a lot of them also carry a tinge of great tragedy or suffering, which may be why the place produces so many excellent novelists) is that nearly everyone’s got a dash-cam. You see them every now and again in other countries, but they’re practically a requirement in Russia — their insurance agencies are somewhat unreliable when it comes to handing out compensation for accidents, so it’s best to get as much evidence as possible when submitting a claim. That leads to compilations like this one:

I’ve seen some bad drivers in Connecticut, but the TURN LEFT NOW NOW NOW synapse doesn’t fire nearly as often here as it seems to in Russia. Also, we don’t have surplus military aircraft buzzing the roads, but I regard that as something of a disappointment.

In addition to producing unintentional vehicular comedy, however, Russia’s dashcams managed to capture the freaking meteor that just slammed into the Ural Mountains.

Brighter than the noon sun! Faster than a speeding bullet! Fortunately, it didn’t hit anyone (Russia is very big and vastly underpopulated, which in this case is quite a good thing), but about a thousand people were injured by shockwaves from the sonic boom or explosion blowing out windows, like you can see in this video:

Those are a few minutes after the meteorite passes by, which is why people are taken by surprise. Sound travels pretty quickly, but it still took a couple minutes to get to them. If it managed to hit a populated area, the damage would have been a lot worse.

This meteor isn’t related to the asteroid that’s currently buzzing earth — 2012 DA14, which will pass within about 17,000 miles of us sometime today. That’s very good news for us; the Russian meteor was probably the size of a fridge, while 2012 DA14 is more like a 15-story building. Were it to hit us, it would slam into the atmosphere at about 30,000 miles per hour and leave a crater the size of Monaco.

This is, of course, something of a less-than-ideal situation. We literally have all our eggs in one basket, at least until the Mars and Moon colonies get going (which might be a while), so it’s important to identify as many of these things as possible, as early as possible. We’re a bit behind on this, unfortunately — there could be as many as one million asteroids that could hit us one day that we simply haven’t mapped yet. I don’t know what it’ll take to really ramp up our orbital defense efforts, but it’d be nice if today’s cosmic assaults had an impact bigger than a crater in the tundra.

Is the world going to end on December 21, i.e. today? I’m glad I asked, and not just because having a question like that in your lede is total SEO-bait. No, the world is not going to end, at least not for the reasons you’d expect. One segment of the Mayan Long Count calendar ends on the 21st, but another one is all set to begin — heck, there are actual Mayans still out there who are planning on having a big party to celebrate the beginning of a new era. There’s no Planet X or rogue star coming to ruin our day — if there were, we’d have totally seen them by now. They wouldn’t even be a secret — you can’t exactly block the sky, and amateur astronomers would have been all over it.

Relax.

Now, here’s two ways we could all die any minute now that have nothing to do with December 21.

Relativistic kill vehicles
Science fiction lies to you all the time about alien invasions. Let’s say there’s an alien species out there who wishes us ill. Maybe they don’t care for our television shows. Maybe they’re space racists. Maybe their particular religion encourages the wholesale slaughter of all nonbelievers.

More likely, what would happen is this: If they were thinking of invading, they’d likely have some kind of lightspeed or faster-than-light travel, so they’d assume that, given enough time, we’d be able to develop similar technology. They’d further assume that we didn’t get to the top of our food chain without being somewhat ruthless (they would have a lot of evidence if they cared to investigate). They’d be forced to conclude that, given enough time, we’d become a threat to them.

So, they’d strike first.

What they wouldn’t do, of course, is do something as silly as invade. Invasion is messy and risky and really not terribly necessary. Instead, they’d shoot us.

Once you can make something move at the speed of light (or faster, if indeed that’s even possible), you can turn pretty much anything into a really scary weapon. The proper term for this is a relativistic kill vehicle, or RKV. Strap a lightspeed engine to an asteroid, say — maybe one as big as a small moon, point it at what you want to be dead, and turn it on. Now you have a bullet that can’t be tracked (since it’s moving at lightspeed, you literally won’t see it coming until it’s right on you) and therefore can’t be stopped. You’d be able to launch it from anywhere at anytime, with no warning, and there would literally be nothing anyone could do about it. Even if you somehow managed to stop the first one, what’s to prevent your enemy from launching another one? Or another thousand?

Considering all the horrible stuff we’ve come up with in the past, the aliens would figure that we’d try to use RKVs on them if we could. They’d probably be right.

Anyways, if they did happen to know where we were, they could have already sent a bunch of RKVs hurtling at us. Better to take care of the problem now, before we start getting any ideas. Any time now, right?

Gamma-ray bursts
Imagine a massive star, much bigger than the Sun. Actually, give this video a quick watch to picture the scale I’m talking about:

When these stars go supernova at the end of their lifetimes, they’re going to very temporarily give off an awful lot of energy — say, 10 billion times as much as our sun will emit in its entire lifetime. It emits these bursts of energy from its poles — so, the top and bottom of the star. They come out in a focused beam that moves at somewhere awful close to the speed of light.

We’ve seen these happen before, all outside our own galaxy. That’s pretty good, because they’re way too far away to do any damage when they hit. Let’s say one did go off in our galaxy, close by, and we were unlucky enough to be in the path of the beam. It’d blow off much of the atmosphere like the seeds of a dandelion, which would be somewhat disruptive to things like crops and global temperatures and pretty much everything else. Everyone on the side of the Earth facing the blast would be so heavily irradiated that we’d probably all end up looking like this guy from the first RoboCop movie:

Maybe it won’t be quite that dramatic, but we’d all be in for a very bad time. There’s some thought that a gamma-ray burst might have been the cause of an earlier extinction, some 450 million years ago. We’d honestly have about as much warning as the trilobites did.

So, enjoy the rest of today. The doomsday prophets, as usual, were wrong. The apocalypse might come someday, but take heart: it’ll be random, probably very quick, and you won’t have to deal with irritating posts on Twitter and Facebook in the weeks leading up to it.

Why haven’t we seen this comet before?
I’m glad you asked, because this gives us a chance to remember just how big space is. Take our sun, for example. It’s the biggest thing in the solar system by a long shot — about 1.4 million kilometers across. That’s pretty big! But wait — the Earth is 150 million kilometers away from the Sun. You could fit more than 100 more suns in that distance, and that’s just between the Earth and the Sun on a straight line. Halley’s Comet, which is the most famous comet around, is about 15 by 8 by 8 kilometers. We’re not quite sure how big C/2012 S1 is, but you can see the difficulty here — it’s not so much “needle in a haystack” as it is “moving needle in a haystack the size of China”. Shoot, it took us until the 1600s to discover Neptune, and that thing is humongous. So, if you have C/2012 S1 coming in from the Oort Cloud, and it’s never been here before, it’s no surprise that we’re just becoming aware of it.

Why does it have that unwieldy name?
Not only is there a lot of space in … space, but there’s a lot of stuff in space. We’re not interstellar yet, but there are 400 billion stars just in our galaxy alone, and our galaxy is only one of about a half a trillion. In our solar system, we’ve got planets, planetoids, moons, comets, asteroids, and one medium-sized star in the center. The important things have names, but they share designations with the unimportant things, so you can quickly communicate information about them to those who understand the system. Let’s break C/2012 S1 down:

C means it’s a non-periodic comet, which is a comet that does not return to the Solar System on a regular basis, if at all. Halley’s Comet is a periodic comet because it comes around every 76 years, which means it’d be designated by the letter P.

2012 is the year it was discovered. Duh.

S is the half-month in which it was discovered. A comet discovered in the first half of January would be labeled A. The second half would be B. The first half of February would be C, and so on. This one was discovered on September 21, and since they don’t use the letter I ‘cause it’s confusing, it’s labeled S.

1 means it’s the first comet discovered in the second half of September.

See? Totally simple. If it were going to hit us, we’d probably give it a different name.

Is it going to hit us?
No.

Are you sure?
Oh, you can never be totally sure. But yes. It’s going to pass within about two million kilometers of the Sun, but the closest it’ll get to us is about 60 million kilometers. No biggie.

How much is a kilometer again?
About six-tenths of a mile. It’s really far away! Don’t worry about it. If you’re going to worry about anything, worry about stuff that actually might kill us, like gamma-ray bursts from distant stars, or relativistic kill vehicles from paranoid alien empires, or the asteroid Apophis.

All of those things sound pretty scary!
You’re right! A gamma-ray burst would blow the atmosphere off our planet like seeds off a dandelion and irradiate us pretty badly. A relativistic kill vehicle would crack the Earth open like a walnut. Apophis would probably just look like Deep Impact, so pretty bad. We can’t do anything about the first two, so don’t worry about it, and I’ll write more about Apophis some other time, but we’ve got a long time before it might (emphasis: might) hit us, and there are a bunch of fun science-y things we could do to stop it, so don’t worry about it.

I’m still pretty worried about it.
OK then, maybe this will distract you. It’s tough to predict exactly what will happen with C/2012 S1, but you’re going to be able to see it with the naked eye in 2013, from about October to January 2014. At one point — and again, this is up in the air — it might briefly outshine the full moon. We’re going to be getting a surprise stellar show for months on end next year, and I couldn’t be happier.

This is all contingent upon the world not ending on December 21, 2012, right? Because I watched this very convincing video that–
Ugh. I’ll tell you what. If the world does end in December, I’ll give you two hundred million dollars. Deal?

Like this:

I found my old copy of Homeworld, Relic Entertainment’s 1999 space simulator and a dark horse candidate for Greatest Game Ever Made. Somehow, the CD still works on my computer, so I’ve been playing it off and on over the past few weeks. For a game that’s over a decade old, it still looks pretty damned good, and the actual gameplay holds up well. I love rediscovering old games — you get to approach them from a more mature perspective, which means you’ll notice themes and motifs you may have missed as a callow, acne-ridden nerd.

Not that I was ever that, mind you. I was a geek. Big difference.

Homeworld starts you off as the commander of your race’s first attempt at faster-than-light travel. Your home planet, called Kharak, is slowly dying — it’s mostly desert and there’s not much around in terms of resources — but fortunately for you, some explorers discovered the remains of an ancient starship buried beneath the desert. The starship had faster-than-light technology, and a map showing you the location of your actual homeworld, on the other side of the galaxy. Your people gathered up their remaining resources and built a big ol’ mothership, with the intent of traveling across the cosmos and discovering your mysterious origins.

The first mission is standard real-time strategy introductory fare; you learn to control your units, make your way around the map, and so on. It has this optimistic, giddy feel to it — like the Apollo program writ large. As your mothership detaches from its gargantuan scaffold for the first time, there’s a real sense of accomplishment, which is odd considering this happens before you have any input at all. Kharak is in the background of this scene, and despite the fact that it’s obviously a harsh planet, it serves as an anchor for the player. You’ve just been introduced to this planet, but you know what it represents: home.

Your hyperspace test goes well, and you jump out to a ship about a light-year away that you had sent on a long-range precursor mission. The scenery is largely the same (you can see the same constellations and nebulae in the sky as in the previous mission) save for one key difference — you can see your home star as a faint, slightly brighter-than-normal speck in the distance. Homeworld’s skyboxes are quite beautiful, but their particular genius is in how they give a certain structure to the emptiness of space. One series of missions has you winding your way farther and farther into a mysterious nebula, the center of which looms larger and larger in your viewscreen until you’re entirely enveloped in it. Another places the Mothership in the middle of a gargantuan, half-completed Dyson sphere, the scale of which produced the most intense feeling of insignificance I’ve ever felt while playing a game. It’s a very simple thing, but more than anything else, it’s responsible for Homeworld’s unique feel.

The second mission ends with the discovery that you’re not only not alone in the galaxy, but that you’re not particularly welcome. Your advance ship has been destroyed by alien raiders, and you head back to Kharak to regroup and plan your next move.

When you exit hyperspace at the start of the third mission, you’re confronted by this:

No lie: when I first saw this scene as a teenager, I teared up a bit. I’d blame misplaced hormones, but even now, when I’m older and know it’s coming, it’s incredibly affecting.

All the moving parts of this scene work together so well. The music, an adapted “Adagio for Strings”, is nothing if not the collected sense of loss and longing in audio form. Your two main characters — Fleet Command and Fleet Intelligence, who up until this point have formed a kind of nurturing mother/stern father duo — are nearly overcome by despair, even as they issue orders and assess the situation. As you scroll the screen around trying to make sense of the situation, you’re confronted with a nightmare version of the opening, optimistic skybox — Kharak is still in the background, but now it’s being eaten alive by fire. You’ve barely started the game, and already it’s punched you right in the gut and let you know just how alone you are.

There’s an additional aspect to this mission, one of those sublime and rare little moments where the developers managed to show what games are really capable of as an art form. Before you can even properly mourn Kharak, Fleet Intelligence draws your attention to a small group of ships still in-system. These ships are the rearguard of the fleet that destroyed Kharak, and they’re in the process of attacking six gigantic trays, each of which contain 100,000 of your fellows in cryogenic stasis. They were designed to sleep through your Mothership’s initial journey to your homeworld, but right now, as Fleet Command urgently notes, they’re all that’s left of your entire species.

Now, you have to do two things here: capture one of the four attacking ships in order to interrogate its crew, and save at least one of the six cryo trays, so your species can rebuild. The number of trays you save, in gameplay terms, is irrelevant; to the best of my knowledge, you don’t get any additional resources or bonuses if you go six-for-six. From my own experience, and in talking about this game around the internet, there seems to be only one approach to this mission: save every single cryo-tray. Even to this day, losing just one of them on that mission will cause me to curse and restart. Any other outcome feels like a failure.

Had Relic not done a masterful job of setting this moment up through the past few missions, it wouldn’t have held nearly the emotional weight that it does. It’s really a masterful stroke — all your affection for Kharak is immediately transferred onto these six featureless hunks of metal, under fire from those who would genocide your whole race. In a movie, you’d be rooting for the Mothership to come to the rescue, but in a game, it’s only up to you. In what other medium could you worry about letting down what you see on the screen?

The moon landings were the kind of defiant audacity that should knock you on your ass just for the fact that we attempted them in the first place. Consider: Apollo 1 failed in the worst way possible, burning up on the launchpad and killing astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. This is the kind of tragedy that quails our courage and consigns good ideas to that part of the map marked “here be dragons”, but the spirit of the time would not allow it to close off our hearts to the moon. Flight director Gene Kranz said in a speech to Mission Control that NASA’s response to the accident was to embody the words Tough and Competent — that is, accountable and thorough in their approach to every subsequent mission. It was an engineer’s credo.Neil Armstrong was an engineer — he would, in his later life, teach aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati — and a test pilot. This put him in a unique position of being able to figure out exactly why the thing he had been flying had tried to kill him. Engines would explode, or stop working, or work a bit too well, and Armstrong would calmly work the problem until he fixed it or the problem became unworkable. They chose him to fly all kinds of planes with “X” in their designation (for “experimental”), planes which seemed to rattle to pieces from the sheer excitement of what they were designed to do. Armstrong flew the X-15, the fastest manned aircraft ever built. On one of his flights, an error in his descent caused him to overshoot the airfield at 2,000 miles an hour — no big deal for Armstrong, who calmly turned his death rocket around and threaded his way between the trees to safety. Neil Armstrong flew planes at 4,000 miles an hour, at 200,000 feet, big round number planes that spoke of a big brave future.

We make drones, now. They have pilots, but those pilots sit in a computer bay thousands of miles away, watching through cameras. If the connection is broken, the drones simply fly in circles, lazily waiting for orders. They have names like Predator and Reaper and Switchblade. Neil Armstrong flew craft called Shooting Star and Starfighter and Gemini.

The science-hero was a staple of early pulp novels — heroes like Indiana Jones or Doc Brass who used their educations as often as their fists*. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made the moon landing into their own pulp novel — they very slightly overshot their original landing area, which would have sent them into a touchdown zone filled with boulders and assorted debris. Armstrong made a call to land the module manually, which he did with Aldrin making speed and fuel calculations in his head. Two men, all alone in a rocket ship, testing their knowledge and nerve against the world’s most stressful math problem. You can try a simulation of it here. It’s not easy.

*Aldrin once punched out a moon landing conspiracy theorist. I hope he lives forever.

Armstrong and Aldrin left behind several things when they blasted off the surface of the moon, back to a rendezvous with Michael Collins in the Command Module. One of those things was an Apollo 1 mission patch, emblazoned with Grissom, White, and Chaffee’s names. We responded to death with bravery and science and no small amount of sentiment.

Neil Armstrong is dead, after accomplishing everything a man could dream to accomplish. Our space program, in a world where an Xbox carries more processing power than Mission Control’s best computers, is reduced to probes and drones and piggybacking off Russian rockets. We owe it to him and Aldrin and the astronauts of Apollo 1 much more than that. Our tragedies should always be followed by triumph. We owe them the moon, again. We owe them Mars. We owe them the solar system and beyond. We owe them the universe.